Virtual Assistant (VA)

A virtual assistant (VA) is a conversational, computer-generated character that simulates a conversation to deliver voice- or text-based information to a user via a Web, kiosk or mobile interface. A VA incorporates natural-language processing, dialogue control, domain knowledge and a visual appearance (such as photos or animation) that changes according to the content and context of the dialogue. The primary interaction methods are text-to-text, text-to-speech, speech-to-text and speech-to-speech.

Being competitive requires enterprises to adapt more quickly to the experience of customers, employees and users. This collection of research notes analyzes the future of experience from the perspectives of IT, marketing, supply chain, and technology and service provider leaders.

There was a shift in the tectonic plates (core foundation) of business and IT services at the turn of this century with the offshore wave (labor arbitrage). We are now in the midst of the next big tectonic shift via automation arbitrage, a term Gartner is using to describe the recalibration of human labor to drive business outcomes. The disruption of artificial intelligence and related technologies (RPA, chatbots, machine learning, and cognitive) is here, and more is on the way. In this webinar, we present the Gartner vision on the impacts to business and IT services. This will likely be one of the most important conversations in the next decade - how automation will change the value proposition in all organizations.

In the future world of healthcare, patients will have wearables, virtual personal assistants and a host of algorithms running in the background to predict and be alerted to clinically relevant situations. This webinar explores the world of healthcare tomorrow where primary care is delivered via the aid of smart machines and devices, where technology is smarter than the human, and where algorithms are the glue that stitches all of it together and the societal, economic and medical impact this disruption will have.